On a busy street corner in Raqqa, Syria, a digger pushes through the rubble of a building hit by an airstrike. Onlookers shield their mouths and noses from the dust and stench of corpses of those who perished beneath.

Just streets away, three recovery workers pull out the delicate skeletons of two children from under the debris of a partially collapsed home. And across the city, in what was once Raqqa's public park, men unearth more bodies from a mass grave.

"Raqqa did not deserve this destruction," says Yasser al-Khamis, who leads the city's emergency response team. "Of course, we understood its fate because it was the capital of ISIS, but we were hoping that the civilian death toll would be lower."

One year after the U.S.-led military campaign against ISIS ended in Raqqa, Khamis' team is still recovering the remains of the battle's casualties. This grim, daily work is revealing a civilian death toll that is dramatically higher than the assessment offered by the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS.

The U.S.-led coalition against ISIS has so far verified 104 unintended civilian casualties caused by its attacks in Raqqa and is investigating more cases, coalition spokesman Army Col. Sean Ryan tells NPR.

"With new information being submitted to the CivCas [civilian casualties] team by a multitude of sources every month, the numbers will presumably go up," Ryan adds.

The workers in Raqqa, however, estimate the real tally is much higher — likely in the "thousands."

Since January, the rescue team has uncovered more than 2,600 bodies. Through their identification process, they say they have found that most of the bodies were civilians killed in coalition airstrikes during the battle for Raqqa between June and October 2017.

Formally called the First Responders Team, the group receives funding from the U.S. government, but the assistance is limited. Its approximately 37 members work long hours for little pay — some are volunteers — and say their efforts are slowed by a lack of heavy machinery needed to access the bodies.

Faster strikes and artillery barrages

Raqqa served as the capital of ISIS' self-proclaimed caliphate for almost four years after the militant group seized the city in 2014.

The U.S.-led coalition's offensive on Raqqa came after several years of fighting the extremist group in Iraq and other parts of Syria.

While campaigning for president, Donald Trump vowed to "bomb the s*** out of" ISIS.

In the months following his January 2017 swearing-in, conflict analysts reported increases in both the numbers of U.S. airstrikes and of civilians reported killed in the attacks.

President Trump reportedly handed decision-making power for major bombardments to the military, enabling airstrikes to be more easily called in by commanders on the ground during a battle.

In May 2017, Defense Secretary James Mattis told CBS News the U.S. was accelerating and intensifying the campaign against ISIS, and added, "We have already shifted from attrition tactics … to annihilation tactics."

In Raqqa, the consequences of the "annihilation tactics" are still keenly felt.

According to Airwars, an independent research group monitoring the anti-ISIS conflicts in Iraq and Syria, the U.S. was responsible for about 95 percent of the airstrikes and all of the artillery barrages in Raqqa. The U.K. and France also participated in the offensive.

Data given to Airwars by the U.S. military's central command show the coalition launched at least 21,000 munitions — airstrikes and artillery — in the city in little over four months.

"Entire families have been wiped out"

By the end of the campaign, Raqqa was a wasteland of smashed concrete; its residential tower blocks were flattened and schools and hospitals toppled. A United Nations study found that over 80 percent of the city — originally home to some 220,000 people — is damaged or destroyed.

Many residents say they lost loved ones in the strikes.

Mohanned Tadfi, 41, recently buried his mother, his brother, his sister-in-law and seven nieces and nephews. "Ten people," he says. "A plane came and hit the house and the building of five floors fell on their heads."

Tadfi says his brother Latuf had found it too hard and dangerous for his family to leave. "ISIS was executing anyone from his neighborhood who tried to escape. And in any case, our mother is diabetic and can't walk well, and it was too difficult [to] carry her because the bridges out of the city had been bombed."

The family stayed in their basement apartment as the war intensified around them. The Syrian Democratic Forces, a U.S.-backed militia, was closing in on the neighborhood and the family thought the fighters would soon capture the area from ISIS.

On Sept. 5, 2017, just after a muezzin in a nearby mosque called the end of noon prayers, an airstrike hit the building where Tadfi's family was. Another brother, Raed Tadfi, went to deliver insulin for their mother. He found Latuf dead on the steps and the building collapsed behind him.

Days later, SDF fighters seized control of the neighborhood. Tadfi says he and his brother asked the militia for access to the house. "Please, there are children under the rubble. My brother's children, young kids. Maybe even just one of them is still alive!" he recalls asking them.

But they were told the area was too dangerous for civilians. It wasn't until three months later that Tadfi was finally able to recover his loved ones. He hired a flatbed truck and took them away to graves he says he dug with his own hands.

The Tadfis' story is one of the cases being looked at by Donatella Rovera, a senior crisis response adviser for Amnesty International who has spent much of the last year in Raqqa. She compiles witness testimonies and analyzes war damage to buildings as part of an ongoing investigation to determine how many civilians were really killed in the coalition attacks.

Determining casualties

In a statement responding to NPR, Col. Ryan, the spokesman of the Combined Joint Task Force, said the coalition conducted "thorough assessments" to ensure it didn't accidentally kill civilians. "The majority of strikes were executed as planned, but to say this was perfect execution from all sides is meaningless and we understand mistakes were made."

He said the coalition was "fighting a ruthless enemy that was systematically killing innocent civilians and unfortunately some were unintentionally killed trying to liberate them, something we tried to avoid."

Rovera doesn't dispute that ISIS tried to prevent civilians from leaving. But, she says,the military knew that before the battle and did not adjust their attack plan accordingly.

Her investigation so far suggests that "many hundreds" of civilians were killed in the Raqqa offensive, which she says prioritized speed, even in densely populated neighborhoods.

Testimony Rovera gathered from embedded journalists and SDF militia sources suggests that strikes sometimes came "within minutes" of a local commander choosing a target.

The rescue unit says it determined most of the more than 2,600 recovered bodies were civilians in a few different ways. ISIS combatants often dressed a specific way and carried an ID card, the workers say. Other characteristics, such as victims' age and gender and testimony from families, also help in the team's documentation.

Rescuers say they recognize airstrike scenes from the scale of the destruction.

Airwars puts the civilian death toll in the Raqqa offensive at 1,400, but it believes the number could be higher. It gathers data largely remotely, through communication with sources and information from social media, and has not been able to verify every reported case.

"We expected a significantly higher portion of civilian harm reports to be determined as credible, since in Raqqa really the only player causing the destruction was the coalition," says Chris Woods, the director of Airwars.

He explains that the coalition has assessed and accepted only a fraction of the casualty reports from Raqqa than it did from the major campaign to drive ISIS from Mosul, Iraq, from October 2016 to July 2017.

"That suggests a political dimension to the decision-making process," he says. "We can't think of another explanation for that discrepancy."

Rovera, the Amnesty International adviser, says it is imperative that coalition forces send ground investigators into Raqqa. "Having dropped the bombs from the sky they should now be sending their investigators on the ground now to establish the facts of what was the impact of those strikes on the civilian population," she says.

Col. Ryan from the coalition said the existing coalition forces in Syria are not a trained investigative force and taking them away "from their mission is not advisable as the fight against this ruthless enemy continues."

For now, Raqqa's people are left to count their dead largely alone, while the U.S. and other powers strike elsewhere in Syria.

npr.org

Last year’s Washington-led coalition effort against the Islamic State (ISIS) group in the Syrian city of Raqqa included numerous “disproportionate or indiscriminate” attacks on the city, showing little regard for civilian lives and constituting potential war crimes, a new report by Amnesty International stated Tuesday.

The campaign to seize Raqqa spanned June to October of last year, and entailed tens of thousands of U.S. and allied air and artillery strikes in support of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S.-backed force dominated by the Kurdish YPG militia.

The report quotes U.S. Army Sergeant-Major John Wayne Troxell, who said:

In five months they [U.S. Marines] fired 30,000 artillery rounds on ISIS targets… They fired more rounds in five months in Raqqa, Syria, than any other Marine or Army battalion since the Vietnam War… Every minute of every hour we were putting some kind of fire on ISIS in Raqqa, whether it was mortars, artillery, rockets, Hellfires, armed drones, you name it.”

“Given that artillery shells have a margin of error of over 100 meters, it is no surprise that the result was mass civilian casualties,” said Amnesty International senior crisis response adviser Donatella Rovera.

Around 90 percent of airstrikes and bombardments and the entirety of artillery strikes were carried out by U.S. military personnel, while the remaining airstrikes were launched by British and French forces. Remaining members of the 70-member U.S.-assembled Coalition assisted the indiscriminate bombing campaign with logistical help, such as refueling warplanes or by helping to identify targets.

As MintPress News has reported, Coalition forces also widely deployed white phosphorus, a chemical weapon, in spite of its urgings that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad refrain from the use of chemical agents in the war.

The report notes:

U.S. Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend claimed that the Coalition’s offensive on Raqqa had been ‘the most precise air campaign in the history.’ The reality on the ground could not be more different.”

Throughout the campaign and afterward, journalists and rights monitors warned about the massive destruction of the city that Coalition efforts had led to, with entire civilian districts facing utter destruction due to their unfortunate inclusion in the city. Raqqa had become the administrative capital of the so-called ISIS “caliphate” in 2014, with civilians bearing the brunt of its jihadist brand of Islamist extremism. Rather than being “liberated” by Coalition forces, however, the people of Raqqa instead faced a war of annihilation that claimed thousands of lives while displacing tens of thousands of residents from their homes.

The U.S.-led coalition’s indefensible attacks on civilians

Documenting the ordeals of four families whose experiences were typical of the broader ordeal faced by civilians, the report offers further damning evidence that the U.S. and its Coalition partners failed to minimize the potential of killing or harming civilians living in the ISIS-ruled city.

The report detailed the plight of the Aswad family, which lost eight members in a single airstrike, as well as the Badran family which lost 39 members, the Fayad family which lost 16 members and the Hashish family which lost 18 members. In each of the cases, powerful bombs struck buildings full of civilians who had taken up long-term residency there.

Amnesty added that the experiences of the families, who were among 112 civilians interviewed by the group in February, offers “prima facie evidence that several coalition attacks which killed and injured civilians violated international humanitarian law.”

Speaking to the BBC, Coalition spokesman U.S. Army Colonel Sean Ryan said that Amnesty personnel should “leave the comforts of the U.K.” and see for themselves how Coalition forces are “fighting an enemy that does not abide by any laws, norms or human concern,” including the use of non-combatants as human shields “in order to sadistically claim the coalition is killing civilians.”

Yet Amnesty did clearly detail in its report how ISIS jihadists also endangered civilians by hiding among them or placing them in harm’s way.

In an opinion piece defending the report, Rovera and Middle East researcher Benjamin Walsby noted:

Everyone we spoke to in Raqqa agreed that Isis had to be defeated. But they asked why their families had to be killed and their city destroyed in the process. The coalition remains stubbornly wedded to the notion that precision airstrikes allowed it to defeat Isis with a minimal cost to civilian life. This is wishful thinking, as Amnesty’s research has revealed in Raqqa (and before that in the Iraqi city of Mosul).”

The report ends with a demand for the Coalition to make a public admission of the civilian deaths in Raqqa, to release information publicly for use in an independent investigation, and to pay reparations to those survivors who suffered due to the indiscriminate or intentional destruction of their neighborhoods, families and homes.

mintpressnews.com

Defenseless civilians in Raqqa are being massacred daily by US terror-bombing.

According to the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria “intensification of air strikes, which have paved the ground for an SDF advance in Raqqa, has resulted not only in a staggering loss of civilian li(ves), but has also led to 160,000 civilians fleeing their homes and becoming internally displaced.”

Tens of thousands of civilians still in the city “fac(e) extreme danger (from) excessive airstrikes.” A humanitarian crisis grips the area. Individuals able to flee have limited or no access to food, water, medical treatment and other life’s essentials.

According to Doctors Without Borders’ northern Syria emergency coordinator Puk Leenders, aid supplies are “very, very limited, and the needs of the population are very high.”

Food delivered by the UN World Food Program is woefully inadequate to feed around 70,000 residents still in the city.

Raqqa is being silently slaughtered. Defense Secretary “Mad Dog” Mattis said “annihilation tactics” are being used – without explaining civilians are being massacred daily.

He lied claiming US forces are “do(ing) everything humanly possible consistent with military necessity, taking many chances to avoid civilian casualties at all costs.”

Terror munitions are being used in residential areas, including white phosphorous, an incendiary weapon capable of burning flesh to the bone on contact.

On July 20, AMN News said “(c)ivilians described the ‘massacres’ in the villages surrounding Raqqa as they arrived in Hama on Thursday, having fled the city and its surrounding countryside.”

“One man recounted how he had travelled form Raqqa where nothing was left save for ‘destruction by the Coalition and ISIS…’ ”

“Houses, families, children, women, all were hit by the random strikes,” he said.

Another civilian said “(t)here is a massacre at every village. There is no exception for that. Massacres took place in all of them.”

US terror-bombing raped and destroyed Mosul. Now it’s Raqqa’s turn. The city and countryside are being systematically annihilated, thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of civilians massacred in cold blood.

Most US-supported ISIS fighters were redeployed elsewhere in Syria. According to a Raqqa refugee, “streets are full of dead bodies. (S)chools were targeted…bridges and mosques.”

Civilian corpses “are lying in…streets.” Raqqa is an open-air graveyard. “Dogs (are) eating (dead) bodies.”

Civilians escaping the carnage blame US terror-bombing for what’s happening. One eyewitness said there’s “(n)othing…left in Raqqa except… destruction.”

“(M)assacres are everywhere.” City residents lost everything – their houses, possessions, spouses, children, everything because of indiscriminate terror-bombing.

Media scoundrels ignore the carnage, pretending it’s humanitarian liberation – countless thousands of civilians liberated from their lives.

stephenlendman.org

“Turkey’s last-ditch efforts to harness Russian military and diplomatic heft to counter the Syrian Kurds and unravel their alliance with the United States are showing few signs of succeeding, like much else in the country’s ill-fated Syrian policy,” writes Amberin Zaman.

The introduction of Russian forces in Afrin is reminiscent of what happened in Manbij, where a threatened Turkish assault was deterred by US forces in the north and Russian and Syrian deployments in the south.

“If anything,” Zaman continues, “both the United States and Russia are steadily deepening their ties with the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and its Arab allies who operate under the umbrella of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). And viewed from Ankara, they are doing so at Turkey’s expense.”

The negotiations between Russia and the Syrian Kurds over Afrin included discussion of possible coordination against Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, now under the umbrella of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whose members slipped out of Aleppo with other armed groups under Turkish cover, according to Fehim Tastekin.

Tastekin writes, “YPG sources told Al-Monitor the two sides [Russia and the YPG] met at Khmeimim air base near Latakia to discuss developing a joint operation against Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (previously Jabhat al-Nusra), which has made Idlib its central base. The Kurds initially insisted that the partnership should also oppose organizations such as Ahrar al-Sham, which Turkey supports. In the end, the sources said, both parties decided not to debate which organizations they will confront and agreed that Russia will set up a base in Afrin. The Kurds said they rejected Russia’s request to have Syrian regime troops at the base and to fly the Syrian flag there.”

He adds, “Zelal Ceger, an official with the Kurdish Movement for a Democratic Society in Afrin, said that the Kurds sought an arrangement with Russia because of persistent attacks on Afrin by Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) and armed groups that Turkey supports,” which includes Salafi and Turkmen armed groups.

Ceger told Tastekin that “this war can escalate — hence our call on Russia for an alliance. There has to be coordination between Turkey and us. Russia will provide that coordination to prevent Turkish attacks against Afrin.”

Tastekin adds that YPG officials rejected a US proposal to include Syrian Kurdish forces backed by Iraqi Kurdistan President Massoud Barzani, calling it a “conspiracy” that could lead to war among the Kurds.

Zaman writes, “Turkey’s strongest card is its long border with Syria and continued influence over assorted Syrian rebel groups, which it has united under the Euphrates Shield command. Since August, Turkey and its rebel allies have cleared the Turkish border of IS forces and after a bloody and protracted offensive captured the IS-controlled town of al-Bab last month. But firmly hemmed in to the east by Russian, Syrian regime and US forces and now to the west by Russian forces in Afrin, Euphrates Shield appears to have reached the limits of its expansion.”

She adds, “The recent split in Ahrar al-Sham, one of the most powerful rebel factions in Syria, with its top leaders defecting to the Jabhat al-Nusra-dominated and al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, will have further weakened Turkey’s hand.”

While the United States is consumed with planning for unseating the Islamic State (IS) in Raqqa, Idlib may prove a comparable or perhaps even more explosive fault line because of the blurred lines among anti-Western Salafi groups such as Ahrar al-Sham, which is backed by Turkey, and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. 

Tamer Osman reports that Syrian “warplanes are increasingly hovering in the sky over Idlib in northern Syria and targeting several residential areas inside the city.”

Tastekin writes, “The Syrian army has been clearing out IS forces from their last Aleppo stronghold. Thanks to an agreement between Turkey and Russia, Turkish-supported armed groups — which oppose the Syrian regime but were also fighting IS in Aleppo — were allowed to leave there with their weapons and families. Most of them settled in Idlib and Azaz. … Russia and Turkey disagree on what to do with these anti-Syrian (and therefore, anti-Russian) groups. Russia wants them disbanded. Turkey would like them to hold onto that area and join the pro-Turkish Free Syrian Army factions to fight the Kurds and keep them from establishing a continuous autonomous region near Turkey’s border. If Russia and the Syrian army open a front against Idlib, clashes with the Turkish-backed groups could spill over to Afrin. Although the Kurds are focused on defending Afrin, they may be amenable to a joint operation with the Russians against threats from Idlib.”

“The biggest problem,” Osman continues, “is the lives of hundreds of thousands of Syrians living in Idlib, as these will not be able to find another shelter amid the ongoing airstrikes falling on the city and its suburbs. This same scenario occurred in areas now controlled by the Syrian regime forces such as the eastern neighborhoods of Aleppo.”

Khaled al-Khateb reports from Aleppo, “Turkey has been training a police organization, the Free Syrian Police (FSP), to help out with secondary operations in Aleppo province so the Free Syrian Army (FSA) can focus on fighting and maintaining control of the areas it has captured.“

Khateb writes, “The FSA’s presence there makes residents targets for the Islamic State (IS).” He adds, “The first FSP group, stationed in Jarablus, was recruited in late 2016 from Syrian refugee camps scattered in Gaziantep and Kilis in southern Turkey, unlike the second group stationed in Azaz and nearby towns, which mostly came from Aleppo province. There has been no shortage of recruits.”

Semih Idiz explains that “there is also speculation, fueled by remarks made by Erdogan in the recent past, about a Turkish effort to turn the FSA into Syria’s new army. If this were to come about, it would mean a Sunni-dominated, anti-Kurdish and anti-Shiite army. Given the big picture as it stands today, though, such an army is highly unlikely to be formed, since it would be blocked by Russia and the United States. The bottom line in all of this is that the prospects for Ankara’s realizing its aims in Syria appear to be dimming by the day — a fact that is also being increasingly noted by Turkish analysts.”

al-monitor.com